Wordpress themes, plugins and tips

Last week i had a client who liked a child theme for genesis, provided by studiopress and i had to work with genesis theme framework. Now i want to share with you how it was to work with genesis and where is good at.

My first impression was that it was somewhat built for wordpress users that have some knowledge on programming. Probably because i felt the need to tweak a lot of things to make my client happy. But those things were easy to do, the main features of the genesis framework helped me.

The genesis framework is more from those who want help to build normal sites with a lot of pages, which needs good navigation and pages to not be shown in the main menu. It saved me a lot of programming time if it were to do all by myself, and it helped me to keep the theme files clean, because most changes will be made trough the administration panel.

Site layout

The first theme functionality that camed into my eyes was the fact that i was able to set the site layout. I was able to select to have one sidebar on the left, one sidebar on the right, 2 sidebars on the left, 2 sidebars on the right, one sidebar to each side or no sidebar at all.

The good thing about this feature is that you can select the layout for each page. You can set either to use the default theme settings, or to choose a specific layout to use for that page.

The ability that genesis theme framework is lacking is the option to set how the sidebar to appear for pages categories, for example to select the layout for pages, for blog list page, for archive, tag pages, search result pages and others. Surprisingly, there is a option to select if the breadcrumbs appear on those pages categories, probably they will implement this in future versions.

Breadcrumbs

A good feature for every site are the breadcrumbs. You have to tell your visitors where they are . Maybe this is not important at all on a blog, but on a site, it is indispensable. Well, the genesis theme framework can show breadcrumbs at one click away, and as i said above, you can select where breadcrumbs are shown:

Navigation

Genesis is probided by default with 2 navigation menus. One is called primary and the other one secondary. For each of them there are cool settings.

As you can see in the above image, there is an option to activate or de-activate, option to select either to display home link or not. You can set the navigation to display either pages either categories, for each of them you can select the order: by title, slug, date or with the help of the default wordpress menu order which you probably would choose.

A good feature is that you can select the navigation depth, one level, two or more, but an awesome feateure is that you can select either what pages to show in the menu, by their ID’s, or what pages to exclude. Well, this could have been done by changhing one line of code, but believe me, changing the code everytime you add a new page is a pain in the ass. And if you don’t have any programming knowledge woul be impossible.

Those features made me to think that Genesis is the best. Well, it has it’s limitations, but it is good for what it does.

Commenting

In genesis you can select from administration panel if you want to allow comments for blog posts or pages. This can be also changed from the code, but it is faster to do it from administration panel, this is the reason those frameworks are built, to save us time.

Author box

Bloggers are very used with this feature. But most people use a plugin for this. Well, genesis theme framework has this included so you don’t have to install other plugins. This is not the first time when genesis can replace a plugin, the same thing is viable for breadcrumbs, navigation, and others.

Header/Footer scripts

Things that you would like to add in the footer or header: analytics tracking code, counters, javascript code. On genesis administration page you can directly copy and paste code that will be added to the header or the footer of your website. That’s cool because you don’t need to edit the template files when you want to add analytics code or some javascript.

There are plugins for that too, but genesis can save you time on this.

SEO

Now you can forget about All in one SEO pack. The genesis comes by default with all seo features you need.

You can add title, description and keywords for every specific page or post, and many other seo features.

Genesis have a special admin page for seo settings, so you can find everything you may think: title setup, follow/nofollow, index/noindex, etc.

Widgets

Genesis theme framework has a set of widgets that can give you some good new features to your site or blog. For example: Featured post and featured page widgets. You can drag featured page and featured post widgets to your sidebar and a huge option list will pop-up.

With this feature you can power your blog to have a main page where you tell your visitors what the blog is about, and then show them recent posts, featured posts, etc.

The genesis theme framework is built on widgets idea. All genesis child themes are built on the widgets idea. They have a set of widgets defined for sidebars and front pages and you just drag and drop there whatever content you like.

Another good feature is that you can set a thumbnail for every post and every page. The featured page and post widgets have the option to show the thumbnail.

You can select whatever you like to display, for posts you can show the title, the thumbnail, excerpt, author gravatar, category.

The genesis featured page have less options: you can select the page, thumbnail, title, content, character limit and alignment.

The child theme i used was Executive theme . On the homepage, it supported one main page added trough the widgets, and 4 featured pages in the footer.

Everything that has to be done is to set thumbnails for each page and then use the feature page widget, drag and drop to every sidebar. A worpress “sidebar” is created for each area of the theme, to be manageable trough the administration panel.

Other genesis widgets that i had not used are: Twitter updates, Category navigation menu with advanced options and user profile.

My experience

My experience with Genesis was fine, it saved me a lot of editing time, very few times i had to work in the code but that was because i did not wanted to install more plugins to do simple tasks that i could do in minutes by editing direct files.

I was also need several plugins to be installed to fulfill my client needs and all work just fine with genesis. Among the plugins that i’ve installed are qtranslate, contact form 7, post footer, Freebie images, zemanta, sociable, tinyMCE advanced, related posts. All worked fine with genesis.

The Genesis theme framework costs $60 and a child theme costs $25, but it worth every penny. You can get the genesis theme framework and child themes from studiopress .

41 Comments on “Genesis WordPress Theme Framework Review”

Thank you for the article, me to i have the problem with genesis, Executive Child Theme, I added a couple of pages, but it does not show up in the menu or submenu, how do i know the page id? or is there another way to do it, am i missing something?

The administration area is completely separate from the front-end. It can be changed but you need someone who’ve done this before. I’ve done it once, not complete change but some minor, like header/sidebar change and style. It was an older version of WordPress but it is completely a waste of time.

If you want to provide your visitors with the ability to sign-up to post articles, i think the best is to leave it as it is now, if you want the visitors to do something else, you can create pages that are available only to registered members. To simplify the word you can install a membership plugin.

In some cases you have to edit the footer.php file from your child theme directory, i’m willing to help you to fix your problem. Please contact me using the contact page with your website url and i will ask you for more info on the mail conversation.

Looks like you know your stuff with the Genesis theme. I’m having a problem in that I’m trying to setup my theme to show related category posts on my pages. Would you be able to help me set this up? Please contact me at the email above if you think you can help.

Great post! However can you advice how do I do create excerpts in pages or categories?

Let’s say I have 12 articles categorized in Featured Article.
When I click Featured Article, it shows full content of all the 12 articles. What I want is, I don’t need all 12 posts to show in one page. Could you please advice? I’m at a lost now.
Please take a look at my site to have an idea of what I meant. Thanks..

To display only a summary on category or homepage you should use the “more” tag. To limit which content will appear on category pages, or tag pages, or search pages, click on the “more” button on your text editor when you edit a post.

It seems that your theme homepage is coded to take only a part of the content, which is great, but to have this on all pages the best way is to use the more tag.

I’ve used studiopress with qtranslate and it works with no problem. There might be some additional features of studiopress that will not be made available in different languages, but you can quick fix that.

Thank you for all the great info. I’m wondering if you could help me understand one thing. I have built two sites using Genesis (child themes Crystal and Enterprise). In neither of these two child themes can I find a header.php file. Am I missing something. Do some child themes have header.php files and others not? I would like to add some social icons to the header but can’t figure out how to do it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your prompt reply, Lucian. So what can be done in that case then to edit the header area of the pages? Can you edit the header.php file of the parent theme? Won’t it be overwritten when the Genesis framework is updated?

You should create a header.php file inside your child theme, copy the content from the parent theme ( or other child theme that it is simple, for example the default child theme ) and start editing it.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Welcome to Flame Scorpion !

I'm Lucian Apostol and i'm a web developer and internet marketer, trying to make the web a better place. For more details check my linkedin profile .